My graphic design skills are poor, a fact all the more frustrating because I have a good enough eye to recognize when something looks bad, but not the aptitude to improve it.

Unlike less restrained people, I haven't inflicted the unreadable crimes of Word Art on my fellow humans since I was a teenager (though as previous work on implementing gradients for the MovieClip drawing API shows, when you have an excuse, playing with garish gradients is still fun!). But along with other design-incompetents, I'm fascinated by adventurous graphics and patterns.

For the age of the internet, Flash has an extraordinarily long history, stretching for almost 15 years since its introduction in 1996. It's had to adapt continually during this time, developing from a simple animation format with limited user interaction to add network connections, video, camera and microphone access, remoting and two separate versions of an extensive scripting language.

The release of Gnash 0.8.8 brings various improvements to rendering, ActionScript execution, compatibility, and flexibility.

But the most significant change is more of a removal than an addition: Gnash no longer has any AVM2 code. AVM2, the ActionScript Virtual Machine introduced in the Flash player 9, is increasingly used in new Flash movies.

It was becoming clear that the original implementation (started in about 2006) of the newer ActionScript Virtual Machine was fundamentally flawed. So fundamentally that it was obstructing code for the old virtual machine without any benefit to Gnash at all.

Finally, the Flash Platform has a rich developer ecosystem of both open and proprietary tools and technologies, including developer IDEs and environments such as FDT, IntelliJ, and haXe; open source runtimes such as Gnash; and open source video servers such as Red5.
[2010-05-17]